Principios del derecho procesal canónicoprincipio de inmediación, relevancia en las resoluciones del tribunal de la rota de la nunciatura apostólica

Resumo

The main objective of our work is to assess the relevance of the principle of immediacy in canonical marriage annulment processes in general, and in the Rota Court of the Apostolic Nunciature in Spain, in particular. The legislator, forensic practice and most of the doctrine, today, they choose for immediacy as a guarantee of higher reliability when it comes to acquire moral certainty by the court, since it puts the judge in direct contact with the sources of judicial knowledge, without intermediaries that spoil the issues, not only linguistic ones, which can be perceived when establishing direct contact with the parts in the different phases of the process and especially, in the evidentiary phase. The work is divided into two clearly contradistinguish parts. In the first part, and from legal hermeneutics and doctrinal análisis, we will address a classification of the principles that govern and constitute the canonical process. Knowing these principles, they will offer us a pyramidal vision of the entire legal-canonical system that allows us to understand what place the principle of immediacy occupies in this legal system. In the second part we analyze the canonical and civil doctrine in order to be able to define and delimit the reach and content of the principle of immediacy and its legal nature, highlighting the isignificance and effects of immediacy in the approach to the truth of the historical facts of the judge and, therefore, in the formation of the necessary moral certainty to settle the controversy. We also verify the acceptance and relevance of immediacy in positive law by conducting an analysis of the sources and legislative texts that govern the canonical marriage annulment process, in all its phases, completed with the most recent doctrine to extract the projections of the principle that have been included in them by the legislator, as well as their exceptions and technological measures that can help to palliate the loss of immediacy. Finally, we have carried out a jurisprudential analysis of the resolutions of the Court of the Rota of the Apostolic Nunciature in Spain (2010-2021) to understand the impact and relevance of the principle of immediacy in them, reaching a series of conclusions that can be extrapolated to all the canonical processes of marriage annulment, achieving a greater knowledge of the importance of this principle in the formation of the moral certainty of ecclesiastical judges.